Cities: Skylines II

Cities: Skylines II is a 2023 city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is a sequel to Cities: Skylines, and expands upon many of the simulation factors such as simulated city and population sizes, and improved traffic AI and management schemes. It was released for Windows on 24 October 2023, and planned to release to PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in Q2 2024. Critical reception praised its gameplay but criticized its performance requirements and other technical flaws.
Gameplay
Like Cities: Skylines, Cities: Skylines II gives the player a virtual plot of land to create a city within. Players can lay down roads, zoning, utilities, and city services to bring in residents and businesses. The player can set city policies like taxes and edicts to influence how the city grows as well as from which they receive funds to continue to expand out the city.
Initially the player is limited to nine tiles of space to build on but can expand out by purchasing additional tiles from city funds as they increase their city's complexity. Whereas the first game was limited to 9 tiles covering 36km2 of area (81 tiles with user modifications) and the remastered edition to 25 (100km2), Cities: Skylines II allows players to build out to 441 tiles representing 159km2 of area. The game, unlike the previous one does not have any limits on the number of citizens that are directly simulated by the game, outside of a player's computer or console bounds, in contrast to the first game that was limited to around 65,000 citizens. Each map with the game is based on a preset climate that will influence weather behavior. Weather and the city population's behavior works on yearly and diurnal cycles, with each in-game day-night equivalent to one month of simulation time. Winter periods brings impacts of snow and other cold conditions, while summer weather can bring excessive flooding and tornadoes. Such disasters can be mitigated with additional disaster response facilities and services within the city.
Cities: Skylines II improves and expands upon the robust city building mechanics fans know from the original, including fully-realized transportation and economic systems, enhanced construction and customization options, and advanced modding capabilities. Players have more fine-tuning control on zoning of residential, commercial, and industrial zones, including more zone types such as mixed-used residential. Signature buildings can be unlocked through specific milestones and placed within zones to impact the quality of the zone. Rather than purely distance as in the first game, the citizens of the game use more intelligent methods to determine traffic routes, using route length, costs, comfort, and agent preference. Services like police and fire stations can also be assigned to specific districts to improve their response times in contrast to the first game. In addition to public safety services, education, and trash management, Cities: Skylines II also adds in services for communications, welfare, and death management. These services can be expanded through upgrades on the existing location rather than having to build a separate service building. Public and cargo transport options is more flexible, allowing for importing and exporting to other virtual cities, and rather than unlocking certain transport options based on city size, Cities: Skylines II has a technology tree that players can use development points to advance and unlock desired transport options.
Development
Cities: Skylines II continued to use the Unity engine, like its predecessor. Unlike the first game, Cities: Skylines II originally targeted to launch on both computers and consoles at the same time, but postponed the console release and thus should improve the performance of the game on consoles.
Cities: Skylines II was revealed on 6 March 2023, as part of the Paradox Announcement Show 2023. Along with the base game, 8 separate DLC are already slated to be released, including the San Francisco Set, Beach Properties Asset Pack, two Content Creator Packs, the Bridges & Ports Expansion as well as 3 Radio Stations in the Ultimate Edition option on the Windows, Xbox and Playstation page.
On 28 September 2023, Paradox Interactive announced that the console versions would not ship as expected on 24 October and that their release had been delayed to spring 2024. They further announced that preorders for the console releases would be closed and that all existing preorders would be refunded to the purchasers. Colossal Order explained that they were delaying the release to improve the quality of console gameplay and the optimisation of both console and Windows versions. Alongside the delay, they also announced an increase to the minimum specifications of the PC version of the game. Colossal Order further stated in the week prior to the PC release that the performance of the game may not be up to expectations at launch, but they have a series of patches planned to improve this.
Colossal Order also stated in October 2023 that while the game would support user modifications (mods) as the original, such mods would be made using the Paradox Mods library which allows for cross-platform support, rather than through the Steam Workshop that the first game had used. At least eight building style packs, developed by popular content creators from the first game, will be made available for free through Paradox Mods.
Reception
Cities: Skylines II received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator website Metacritic.
Leana Hafer from IGN said that, although it has new enjoyable systems, the game can get better with post-launch content, stating "it feels like playing a beta, or a very early Early Access game."
At launch, the game reached more than 100,000 cocurrent players on Steam. However, it received "mixed" reviews from players, with majority of the reviewers criticizing the game's various performance issues.
Ed Smith from PCGamesN describes how initial peaceful gameplay gave way to "supreme frustation and rage". However, in his Cities: Skylines II review he concludes "Something personal is lost in its larger scale while performance problems spoil the beauty, but this could one day become the superior city building game." and scores the game seven out of ten.
References
External links
City-building games
Construction and management simulation games
Paradox Interactive games
PlayStation 5 games
Single-player video games
Video games developed in Finland
Windows games
Transport simulation games
Xbox Series X and Series S games
Colossal Order (company) games
2023 video games
Video game sequels